My images/forms begin where our defensive constitution collapses and reorders itself : devouring, digesting, regurgitating, absorbing, reflecting desire and the reality that we are always composing, recomposing and decomposing ourselves. The artwork reflects subjective experience and an abiding attraction to the rituals of many cultures.
"33 SWOONINGS", a large project of the past three years, encompasses paintings, sculpture, and a multimedia performance that express the eternal longing for the sacred amid a disarming of language, ancient and digital. With our insupportable eroticism we human beings are always between nature and culture. Diving into the cleavage of our animal and language making selves, these images form a multilayered space for confusion. Swoonings refers to moments of syncope which delay, anticipate, provoke and resolve dissonance. Syncopation, the beat in between, as in a tango (duende), allows for the lost moment.
The intersection of imagery, of ritual and of performance has long inspired my painting and has been fueled by my documentary work on the masquerades of West Africa. The sculpture, painting and video are the residue of a process of insisting on the primacy of the physical body, its interiority of space, porosity of boundary and the violence of creating sacred space. In the sculpture and choreography gestures such as mudra (symbolic positions of the hands employed in Hindu dance and yogic practice) and postures of the body are among a catalogue of imagery that alludes to ritual. Biologically or physiologically induced states of being (epileptic seizure, aphasia, hallucination, hearing voices, the hiccup) are also referenced. The body acts as threshold for kinds of awareness, spiritual and erotic. Animal imagery suggests the sacred and sacrifice.
Cosmograms and other schemata (from numerous traditions and some my own) in the video allude to our irrepressible impulse for symbol making. Charts that reference genome schemata, binary computer language, neurological, motor and synaptic charting of the ephemera of our bodies are present day cosmograms. "33 SWOONINGS" is an amalgam of notations: sonic, visual, tactile and olfactory, that speak of our porous boundaries and spiraling minds.
In" SEWING SONGS", a work in progress, voices and images of an oracle, bees, and the sea are stitched together in a live and digital mix which meanders through a 60 yard garment. This performance, interweaving live music, dance and video, is a variety of contrasts facing off in noise and silence. Chaos in a tango with the honeyed order of bees creates strange elastic couplings between corporeal and incorporeal things. "From within the matrix electronic we weave our networks with threads of ones and zeros we ride digital carpets looking at a dazzling displacement ŠWe are seeing double."
With the installation "PROTEAN BODIES/CIRCES BODY" figure sculptures are mutations of generative boundaries in a world where communications and biotechnologies are recrafting our bodies. Voices whisper in sound works created for the installation for nothing has any shape that isn't ripe with overflowing it's skin.
"For wherever we see luminous matter, we should expect to find dark matter as well." Physicist James Trefil,
Jenny Lynn McNutt 2002
"... So in addition to McNutt’s bravery in exploring her own private psychic spaces, her imagery has profound social implications: how one person connects to another becomes the basis of a politics founded on erotic attraction, desire for autonomy, and the constant negotiations that ensue, both private and social, when we plunge our heads into the body of a lover or the body politic. McNutt’s way of seeing the body plunging through a void, stripped naked, is a beautiful illustration of the unaffiliated fact of the human body. But this stripped bare fact is powerfully countered by the artist’s means of producing images, which conjures up the connective web of our computerized world. Given the political climate of our day, McNutt’s intuitive critique of Aristophanes’ story (of the origin of desire, The Symposium) makes us feel three things: the difficulty of having a body; the problem of wanting another body to complete our own body; the need for constant, mutual negotiations to make sure that the wish for completion doesn’t devolve into a desire to dominate and coerce—and this is as true of lovers as it is of nations. No other artist of our day has captured with such fidelity, intelligence, and deep-founded empathy the problem of being two, and of trying to remain two, while wanting, or being pressured, to merge into one."
Writer Tom Sleigh, 2005
